Why you should use Pay Per Click advertising 2: Optimising your PPC campaign

Having a Pay Per click campaign is one thing but you need to make sure that you get the highest click through rate possible.

If you optimise your Pay Per click campaign you will reduce the cost per click to your business, get a better quality score on your Google page rank and get a higher click through rate for your efforts.

You will improve your campaign ROI (Return on Investment) and you will increase awareness of your brand in your chosen market..

You do need to consider a few factors that will help you optimise your campaigns.

Before you start your campaign makes sure that you have a clearly defined objective, goal and call to action. What do you want your readers to do when they reach your page? Do you want them to download, purchase something, or subscribe to the newsletter. Make sure your call to action is clear. Without a carefully thought out call to action, you will not be successful. Other things you need to consider are:

Carry out audience segmentation and define the audience you want to reach. Research on different audience groups and segment them in ways that are meaningful to your business. Are they seniors, middle aged families or teens? Are they stay at home mums or workers? Retired or job hunters? Single or in a relationship. Once you have your segmentation, you can start to put your plan together.

Define your intended location. use geo-targeting to focus on a small location. This is useful for advertising campaigns in physical locations, such as the opening of a new shop or business. You can then ensure that the relevant people will see the advert

Define your keywords. Segment your keywords into groups according to the target audience. Think about using negative keywords and spelling mistakes. Consider joining words together. People often make typing errors when they search for terms. Do proper keyword research across all platforms and use these effectively.

Work on the landing page or destination page for each advert. Experiment with different copy on each page. Change the images and wording for each landing page you test. you will then be able to see which version of your page is the most effective.

Position your advert in different areas of the page itself. Does the advert work better at the top or the side of the page? Experiment with the ad to see where you get the most clicks.

Test, Test, Test. Try different ad positions and different landing page combinations. you will be able to check which ad is having the greatest impact.

If you find that some of your ads are not working, for example, they have a very low click through rate then remove them. You can then focus on the higher clicked ads and refine them further. you will then have extra budget available to invest in your top performing keywords and optimise your strategy for other ads.

Have a look at your keywords often and evaluate how they are performing. Remove any keywords from your ad with poor quality scores and focus on those keywords that give you good quality scored. If any keywords are not performing well then pause the campaign for those keywords.

Review your goals and optimise your campaign. After all you want much more than clicks. You want the clicks to convert into actual downloads, leads ad sales.

Keep measuring, optimising and testing to get the best quality campaign across all of the platforms.

Creating a great PPC campaign is a large investment in time and potentially money. But if you have time to invest in your PPC campaign, then the results will be significantly better than a poorly placed advert that gets you nothing but wastes your time.